This was strange, but then it was Wilkie Collins. It was an above average read, so 3* , were that possible.
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I love Wilkie Collins and was delighted to find this one which was new to me. A good story well told. Quite the page turner. I enjoyed Nicholas Boulton's narration and recommended this to my sister right away. ( )

On the third of September 1828, two women were widowed in two different countries. Neither the widows, Mrs Wagner and Madame Fontaine, knew their counterpart, nor had their husbands known each other. Nothing surprising in this, except Wilkie Collins is telling their story through his narrator David Glenney fifty years later, so the reader knows something is up.

Unusually for the times, Mrs Wagner's husband in London left her in full control of his businesses in London and Frankfurt. Mme Fontaine was left with her husband's debts, despite the fact that he had been a famous experimental chemist with university connections. Money and science, two of Collins's favourite topics; throw in Mme Fontaine's young daughter Minna, and the stage is set.

The connection was first made when Mrs Wagner's Frankfurt business partner, Herr Keller, sent his son Fritz to her London branch. Herr Keller felt Fritz had formed an undesirable attachment to none other than Minna. It wasn't Minna he objected to, but rather her mother, 'Jezebel', the Widow Fontaine, now accused of stealing highly dangerous experimental medicines from her husband's lab. The Widow Fontaine, however, was bound and determined that Minna should find the happiness she felt she had been denied, by marrying Fritz, no matter what it might take to overcome Herr Keller's objections.

Collins had worked with the bare bones of this story twenty years earlier in his play [The Red Vial]. It had been unsuccessful, partially because the format did not allow an exploration of the women's characters. The novel format made it possible to develop them. Here are two determined, intelligent, and focussed women; one using her talents to advocate for working women and institutional reform, the other using them to deceive and murder.

There is a third character here linking the women. Jack Straw, whose name suggested upheaval and uncertainty, had been released from Bedlam into Mrs Wagner's care in an effort by her to show what compassionate care could do. In a climatic scene in a death house in Frankfurt, he demonstrated the results of this care.

Reform and sensationalism were high on the list of popular themes in Victorian novels. There is no lack of either in Jezebel's Daughter. It was no accident that Collins made the Widow Fontaine a foreigner, feeding into domestic fears of the other, as well as worry in some quarters over the developing path of European science. At home, poison had a certain fascination in real life and in novels, one which Collins himself had explored in earlier novels. Here though, he had another goal as well. In a letter to his Italian translator, he said ...in 'Madame Fontaine', I have endeavoured to work out the interesting moral problem, which takes for its groundwork the strongest of all instincts in a woman, the instinct of maternal love, and traces to its solution the restraining and purifying influence of this one virtue over an otherwise cruel, false, and degraded nature.

While this might not be the image of woman today, whether Mme Fontaine found any redemption in the end is for the reader to decide. What isn't in doubt is that once again Collins has created a memorable villain.

La señora Wagner, viuda de un comerciante, está decidida a proseguir los planes de reforma de su difunto marido: la incorporación de las mujeres al trabajo y la reeducación de «los pobres mártires del manicomio» apelando a «su dignidad». Con este propósito, y acompañada por el «loco» Jack Straw, orgulloso pero leal, viaja a Fráncfort, donde la empresa tiene una filial. Allí su socio, el señor Keller, tiene sus propios problemas: su hijo Fritz insiste contra su voluntad en casarse con Minna, hija de madame Fontaine, una viuda cargada de deudas y de dudosa reputación, pero empeñada, a toda costa, en asegurar la felicidad de su hija. Cuando el señor Keller cae misteriosamente enfermo, madame Fontaine lo atiende con devoción, echando mano de desconocidos remedios creados por su difunto marido, un investigador químico. Todo parece entonces despejado para la boda entre los dos jóvenes. Sin embargo…

‘I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature—only a woman, Julie!—armed with the means of secretly dealing death around her, wherever she goes—meeting with strangers who displease her, looking at them quietly, and saying to herself, “I doom you to die, before you are a day older”’ (77)

I read this book afraid it would contain a female scientist. Not only have I previously published a claim that that was first done in a later novel, but that later novel was also by Wilkie Collins; it seems rather embarrassing to overlook one Collins novel in the rush to establish the importance of another. Somehow, I did not hear of this novel until much more recently. I am safe, however. Jezebel's Daughter is about a woman using scientifically created poisons, but she herself did not create them. Madame Fontaine's late husband was a genius chemist, but she can do nothing more than follow the directions for administering and curing poison he left behind; she cannot even create more of them.

Professor Fontaine dies on the first page of the novel, however, meaning that there is nothing here that will really factor into my project on fictional Victorian scientists. What we hear of him, though, bears many traces of the stereotypical scientist. Madame Fontaine at first loved her husband, and pinned her hopes on him having a distinguished career, but even though he was a medical doctor, he gave it up for a life of experimental science, which had much less social possibility. She bemoans to a friend, "you have married a Man! Happy woman! I am married to a Machine" (75). At the height of his ambition, he becomes what she calls an "Animated Mummy," so lean and dirty is he as he neglects almost everything in his pursuit of chemical discoveries (75).

There's also a Hungarian chemist, never named, but described as "the most extraordinary experimental chemist living" and "[t]he new Paracelsus" (74). He's the one who bequeaths the formulas for the poisons to Professor Fontaine, and he's the one who inspires Professor Fontaine to sink his whole career into experimental chemistry. But he commits suicide, seemingly for scientifically logical reasons: "After giving it a fair trial, I find that life is not worth living for. I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own discovery. [...] [M]y body is presented as a free gift to the anatomy school. Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my remains. I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me" (76). He feels like a forerunner for Doctor Nathan Benjulia in Heart and Science (1882-83), a vaguely foreign, sinister, Godless presence lurking at the margins of the novel and enabling some of its darkest moments, but not directly involved in the main plot. (Unlike in Heart and Science, where the villainous Mrs. Gallilee admires Benjulia, Madame Fontaine plainly disapproves of the Hungarian.)

This novel also feels like a forerunner for Heart and Science in its exploration of female villainy. Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is a strange mix of femininity and anti-femininity. She departs from social mores, but one sense the novel doesn't entirely disapprove of her: it's set in 1828, but narrated retrospectively from the time of publication (1879-80), and the narrator occasionally comments that things were different for women then, they had less options. (The narrator's aunt is the director of a trading company that employs many women, and this is figured as unusual.) So when Madame Fontaine poisons people, you can kind of understand where she's coming from in a society often arrayed against women, as the epigraph above reveals, or the following delightfully villainous speech: "Power! […] The power that I have dream of all my life is mine at last! Alone among mortal creatures, I have Life and Death for my servants. […] What a position! I stand here, a dweller in a popular city—and every creature in it, from highest to lowest, is a creature in my power!" (145)

Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is pursuing motherly ends through un-motherly means. She simply wants her daughter to be happy-- but is willing to stop at nothing to make it happen. But also like Mrs. Gallilee, she's often obsessed with the appearance of propriety over actual propriety; she refuses to moderate her spending when the family coffers begin running low, insisting it is simply not done, and she must live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. It is a monstrous femininity, its strengths and weaknesses all magnified to dangerous proportions. If you've already read Heart and Science, then, Jezebel's Daughter very much comes across as the dry run for it; in a sense, Heart and Science just takes the husband's scientific sensibility and transfers it to his wife; Mrs. Gallilee is everything Madame Fontaine is with the addition of seeing like a scientist.

Jezebel's Daughter is like Heart and Science in one final way: it is very much minor Collins. There's none of the thrills or mysteries of The Woman in White or The Moonstone or No Name to be found here. It has its moments, but Collins can do better.